The once and future 'Candidate'

John Frankenheimer's classic captures the '60s but stays ahead of its time

November 28, 2002|By Michael Wilmington, Tribune movie critic.

John Frankenheimer's great 1962 political thriller "The Manchurian Candidate" -- now being celebrated with a deluxe 40th-anniversary re-release at the Music Box Theatre -- is one of those movies that just keeps growing in stature and impact over the years.

A commercial and critical failure on its first release , this amazingly prescient and wildly original picture -- from Richard Condon's novel about Cold War politics, brainwashing, assassination plots and Freudian psychology -- became first a cult film embraced by such taste makers as Pauline Kael and, eventually, an accepted classic.

What changed in the years after its release were our perceptions of what a movie can be and of what America really was in 1962. That was, of course, the Kennedy era and "Candidate" was a Kennedy film -- with a director and a star (Frank Sinatra) who were intimate with the Kennedy family, a story that was congruent with Kennedy's anti-Communist liberalism and even an imprimatur from JFK himself, who expressed such enthusiasm for the project to Sinatra that the money-men were swayed.

Ahead of its time

"Manchurian Candidate" is ahead of the curve even today: more sophisticated, more perversely ingenious and impudently intelligent, and done with more bravura, than all but a handful of films in the last 10 years. (Variety recently announced that a remake of "Manchurian Candidate" -- from director Jonathan Demme and star Denzel Washington -- is in the works. Much as we can hope, one doubts it can match or surpass the first.)

"Candidate's" hero, Bennett Marco (Sinatra) is an American Army officer, captured along with his patrol by the North Koreans and taken to a brainwashing center in Manchuria run by the genial psychiatric expert Yen Lo (played by Khigh Dhiege ). There, Marco and company uncomprehendingly watch Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), programmed as an assassin by Yen, kill two patrol mates at Yen's orders.

The sequence is presented as Ben's nightmare -- but one that makes him wary of Raymond, who has been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and comes home in triumph to his adoring mother (Angela Lansbury) and her addled, drunken, but successful second husband, Commie-baiting U.S. Sen. John Iselin (James Gregory). As Ben painfully tries to resume civilian life, the glum Raymond -- who despises his parents -- tries to avoid their attempts to exploit him for Johnny's presidential campaign and resume his romance with beauteous Jocie (Leslie Parrish ), daughter of liberal Sen. Thomas Jordan (John McGiver). Ben, helped by his sudden inamorata Rosie (Janet Leigh), eventually digs out the truth: Raymond is being controlled by Communist agents who want to use him to assassinate U.S. leaders, help Iselin gain power and turn the country over to Mrs. Iselin, their longtime secret agent.

It's a horrendously complex plot -- and one of the reasons it works so well as a movie is that Frankenheimer, the master of live TV drama, was a genius at logistics, as heavily influenced by TV news and "method" theater as he was by the German Expressionist-drenched visuals of Orson Welles and "Citizen Kane." His movie begins with a virtuoso sequence that almost leaves you breathless: the brainwashing scene in which Yen Lo demonstrates Raymond's killing skills to a mixed Chinese-Russian audience, with the U.S. soldiers trapped in the delusion that they're attending a horticultural lecture on hydrangeas at a women's community group.

Mind-blowing sequence

Frankenheimer shot this sequence in a variety of ways -- mixing up the Russian and Chinese military cadre with their middle-age female counterparts, while the backgrounds keep shifting and establishing the whole nightmare with a 360-degree swivel-pan in which one set vanishes and the other suddenly appears on railroad tracks. This truly mind-blowing sequence is the movie's piece de resistance -- but also the precursor of horrors to come -- as we watch Raymond, in the grip of foreign captors and his malevolent mother, turn zombie killer.

Most remarkable is the way the moviemakers, taking their cues from Condon's brutally candid book (which contains scenes of incest), mix up Cold War and sexual politics.

Sinatra, later a Reagan pal, was then a fervent Kennedy supporter, and some critics of "Manchurian Candidate" carp that Ben is too much like the off-screen Sinatra. But that's obviously what screenwriter George Axelrod and Frankenheimer intended.

Leigh's Rosie is a smart, dishy sidekick, Harvey's Raymond is a believable zombie, and Iselin is a "Pogo"-style political caricature. But the film's most extraordinary performance is by Lansbury as Raymond's nameless mother. That same year, Lansbury did another voracious mother -- to Warren Beatty's sexy rat Berry-Berry in Frankenheimer and William Inge's "All Fall Down." Here, she pulled out all the stops -- conveying absolute love and world-conquering evil with subtlety and bone-chilling intensity.